FIEMSER | Intelligent control system

The project FIEMSER (Friendly Intelligent Energy Management System for Existing Residential Buildings), is developing an energy management system for buildings (BEMS) in order to decrease the energy consumption and increase the use of more sustainable energy sources. The technologies developed within the project are new and innovative elements in the field of damage-reducing techniques, designed to increase energy awareness and decrease the emissions of greenhouse gases.

The intelligent control system (ICS) is one of the components in the BEMS system, used for making the control decisions of the BEMS to optimise the energy management of the building. The ICS will minimize the building energy demand, energy cost and CO2 emissions while managinglocal generation and energy storage. The ICS system is composed of three modules with a focus at different timeframes of the building energy use: The future, the present and the past. These modules allows the ICS to fill a number of functions: i) forecasting the energy demand and the intermittent local renewable energy generation of the building, ii) scheduling the operational plan of energy storage, generation systems and shiftable loads as well as monitoring the execution of this plan, iii) monitoring the users behaviour in order to suggest a more efficient use of energy in the building, iv) estimating the energy efficiency in the monitored building.

The ICS uses external information and specific data to forecast the energy demand of the building during the present day (until midnight). The energy demand of the house is calculated through information on building-specific features such as isolation, windows, facades, hot water and lighting, daily activity etc. The external weather forecast provides the external information needed to make an appropriate prediction on the energy use. The generation of renewable energy is calculated using information on the systems connected to the building, such as area and orientation of solar panels etc., as well as weather conditions.

The forecasted energy demand and renewable energy generation is thereafter used in combination with information from other local energy generating units, energy storage facilities and energy prices in order to schedule the operation of these systems and loads within the house (such as washing machines etc). The system is continuously monitoring the plan, identifying deviations and making new plans if needed. The ICS is also sending operation orders to the components of the schedule at the right time.

The users in the building are monitored by the ICS system through an analysis of the current energy loads, comfort settings and building-specific data.

The energy efficiency of the building is calculated through comparing past energy use during the same operation context with the day-before-real energy consumption.

The project within which the ICS system has been developed is funded under the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission (FP7), which is a grant funding programme, running for three years and will come to an end in 2013. As the project is still running and its outputs are not complete yet, the technology readiness level of the ICS system is currently estimated to be 3 on the TRLscale, according to the scope of the seventh framework programme, which provides public grant partial funding for R&D. The project is coordinated by the Technology Centre Tecnalia in Spain.